Fedorenko To Be Put On Trial By Soviets

June 4, 1986|By Patricia Elich, Staff Writer

Feodor Fedorenko, a former Nazi concentration camp guard deported after a sensational federal court trial in Fort Lauderdale six years ago, will be tried for war crimes next month in the Ukraine, a Soviet news agency announced Tuesday.

Fedorenko, 79, lived in the United States 35 years before he was deported in 1984 for violating immigration laws.

He was living in Miami Beach when he was first brought to trial in 1978 in Fort Lauderdale for helping preside over the Nazi death camp in Treblinka, Poland, where it is estimated more than 800,000 people were systematically exterminated.

Fedorenko was accused by the U.S. Justice Department of lying to immigration authorities about his wartime activities when he fled Germany after World War II.

During the trial, elderly Jewish survivors of the camp were flown in from Israel and parts of the United States and Canada to testify about treatment at the camp.

Witnesses said Fedorenko had served as an armed guard at Treblinka and had beaten, whipped and shot prisoners at the notorious death camp.

The Soviet news agency Novosti said Fedorenko will be tried for ``crimes against humanity.``

``In mid-June, the Crimean regional court in Simferopol, in the Ukraine, will try Feodor Fedorenko . . . who served in the Treblinka fascist concentration camp during World War II,`` the news agency said. ``Fedorenko served in Treblinka, one of the most terrible concentration camps of Hitler`s Germany . . . Gas vans, shootings and tortures were all in a day`s work for the fascists.``

One South Florida survivor of the death camps said the trial is long overdue.

``It took a long time,`` said Sam Desperak, 67, a resident of Delray Beach and president of Holocaust Survivors of South Florida Inc. ``Why did it take such a long time?``

For his first 20 years in the United States, Fedorenko lived the quiet life of a brass-factory worker in Waterbury, Conn.

He then retired in 1973 to Miami Beach, living among elderly Jews, many of them prison camp survivors.

Immigration charges were filed against him in 1977.

In his trial before U.S. District Judge Norman C. Roettger Jr., prosecutors claimed Fedorenko`s lies and omissions prevented an investigation that might have resulted in denying him entry. They said Fedorenko had told immigration officials he was an inmate of the prison, not a guard.

If the vice consul who approved Fedeorenko`s visa had known he stood guard at Treblinka, Fedorenko would certainly have been denied entry, an expert government witness testified.

Roettger, however, ruled the government did not prove that Fedorenko`s work as a guard would have automatically disqualified him for a visa.

In 1979, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Roettger.

Following an unsuccessful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Fedorenko was stripped of his U.S. citizenship in 1981. In December 1984, he was deported to the Soviet Union after his attorney was unable to find another country that would take him in.

Now under Soviet jurisdiction, he faces the maximum sentence of life in prison or death by firing squad.

Novosti said that, during the war, Fedorenko finished a special SS school that trained overseers for concentration camps where people of many nationalities were killed en masse.

``After the rout of German fascists, Fedorenko fled overseas,`` the agency said. ``Like the hangman Lyons Klaus Barbie, he lived peacefully in the United States for many years.`` Barbie has since been deported to France, where he is awaiting trial.

At the various hearings prior to his deportation, Fedorenko maintained he was captured by German soliders shortly after being drafted into the Soviet Army and was then ordered to be an armed guard at the camp.

He claimed he had harmed no one and that he too had been a prisoner at the camp who was beaten, starved and terrorized.